Double-Takes

David R. Jarraway, David R. Jarraway

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780776619897
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires nord-américaines

Over the past forty years, Canadian literature has found its way to the silver screen with increasing regularity. Beginning with the adaptation of Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God to the Hollywood film Rachel, Rachel in 1966, Canadian writing would appear to have found a doubly successful life for itself at the movies: from the critically acclaimed Kamouraska and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in the 1970s through to the award-winning Love and Human Remains and The English Patient in the 1990s. With the more recent notoriety surrounding the Oscar-nominated Away from Her, and the screen appearances of The Stone Angel and Fugitive Pieces, this seems like an appropriate time for a collection of essays to reflect on the intersection between literary publication in Canada, and its various screen transformations. This volume discusses and debates several double-edged issues: the extent to which the literary artefact extends its artfulness to the film artefact, the degree to which literary communities stand to gain (or lose) in contact with film communities, and perhaps most of all, the measure by which a viable relation between fiction and film can be said to exist in Canada, and where that double-life precisely manifests itself, if at all.
- This book is published in English.

PART ONE

REALISM AND ITS “OTHERS”

BEYOND THE NATIONAL-REALIST TEXT: IMAGINING THE IMPOSSIBLE NATION IN CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN CINEMA

JIM LEACH

“Nation” and “realism” are two of the most contested terms in contemporary film studies, not least in critical discussions of Canadian cinema. Film theorists have argued that the study of national cinemas reinforces reactionary nationalistic ideologies and is, in any case, increasingly irrelevant in the age of globalization. Similarly, the aesthetics of realism, as developed in much early film theory, have been attacked for simply showing the way things are rather than encouraging the viewer to adopt a critical perspective. In this paper, I will explore some of the implications of the linkage between nation and realism in the discourses of Canadian cinema and then discuss the ways in which these discourses have been challenged in the work of three contemporary Canadian directors: Atom Egoyan, Denys Arcand and Guy Maddin.

In my book Film in Canada, I coupled these contested terms by describing the mandate assumed by John Grierson, when he came to Canada in 1939 as the first commissioner of the National Film Board, as a national-realist project. I was alluding to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “national-popular” to suggest how Grierson sought to use the conventions of documentary realism to provide evidence of the existence of the nation as an imagined community.1 Grierson was building on his own work in Britain in the 1930s, but there he was seeking to inflect already existing national traditions in order to encourage the modernization that he felt those traditions were impeding. Canada, as Grierson saw it, did not have “a great store of national images,” and his task was thus one of nation-building (qtd. in Evans 94). It should also be noted that, even before Grierson arrived in Canada, a very similar documentary project had been undertaken in Quebec in the documentary films made by a number of Catholic priests, notably the Abbés Proulx and Tessier, although, of course, the “nation” there had very different connotations.2

Although Grierson was involved in a “nation-building project,” my identification of the tradition he inspired as a national-realist one does not entail, as one reviewer of the book suggested, a belief in the “the stability of the national” (Burgess 92). I agree with Stuart Hall that “modern nations are all cultural hybrids” and that, “instead of thinking of national cultures as unified, we should think of them as constituting a discursive device which represents difference as unity or identity” (297). The national-realist project sought to contribute to the building of a national culture, in this sense, and its products often show the strains and tensions involved in representing difference as identity. Indeed, Grierson’s own thinking about both nation and realism was complex, not to say contradictory, and we need to examine each term a little more closely to see what was at stake in their articulation.

Another critic transformed my term into “nationalist-realism,” but Grierson was very much an internationalist, and his goal was to build a sense of national identity in Canada that would enable it to become a progressive force in international affairs (Melnyk 20). Although he was undeniably concerned to produce identity out of difference, he nevertheless insisted that Canada’s “lack of unity” was “healthy and interesting” (qtd. in Evans 94). Under Grierson, the NFB would document regional differences, but would also try to provide evidence of common interests that transcended those differences. In this respect, Grierson’s attitude has much in common with Northrop Frye’s later claim that “the tension between [the] political sense of unity and the imaginative sense of locality is the essence of whatever the word ‘Canadian’ means” (iii).

“Realist” might seem to be a simpler matter, but this aspect of the project has provoked very different critical reactions. On the one hand, Alan Lovell argues that, for Grierson, “the essential nature of the cinema came from its ability to record the appearances of everyday life (this for him was ‘the real world’)” (24). On the other, according to Ian Aitken, “Grierson did not use the term ‘the real’ to refer to empirical reality, but to abstract underlying reality, and he believed that the essential function of cinema was to record this underlying reality, and not the superficial details of everyday life” (12). I think that these apparently opposed formulations are both correct: the goal of the national-realist project was to represent underlying reality by first recording the superficial details (just as national feeling emerges from beneath surface differences). In the classic documentary style developed under Grierson’s tutelage, the images are grounded in close observation of a particular actuality, while the work of transcending difference is largely entrusted to what Bill Nichols calls “the voice of documentary”—in this case the authoritative voice-of-God commentary but also the organization of the images—which affirms the common interests that the apparently distinct reality supposedly shares with the viewer’s own situation (18). It should be added that Grierson’s realism also had an ethical dimension, which insisted that people should “accept the environment in which they live” rather than be seduced by the escapist fare of, for example, Hollywood cinema (qtd. in Hardy 143). In other words, they must be “realistic.”

Grierson’s approach is well represented in Alexis Tremblay, Habitant, a 1943 documentary depicting the daily life of a Québécois farming family.3 It begins with the caption CANADA PRESENTS, followed by a map of Quebec, towards which the camera slowly moves to locate the rural community on the banks of the St. Lawrence with which the film will be concerned. The commentary describes the inhabitants as descendants of pioneers who came from France 300 years ago to found a “new world in the wilderness.” The camera then pans across a hilly landscape to reveal a church whose bells, we are informed, are ringing the Angelus, the “hour of evening.” Then we see a farmer, whom the commentator identifies as the “thrifty” Alexis Tremblay, driving a horse back from cutting the first hay of the season. This opening situates the film in a specific place and time, setting up the conflation of the religious year and the natural seasons that will organize its depiction of a year in the life of the Tremblay family. It emphasizes the importance of traditions rooted in the past, but the commentary will later refer to the use of modern farming methods, implying that these complement rather than threaten traditional values.4 The film documents the particular material and cultural practices of a Quebec rural community, but in such a way as to imply that these are a response to conditions and problems found in similar situations elsewhere.5

After Grierson left Canada in 1945, the NFB filmmakers gradually developed a new form of documentary, often referred to as direct cinema. Although the national-realist project was retained, the implications of both nation and realism, and their articulation, were now more insecure, with the avoidance of a voice-of-God commentary being the most obvious sign of the change. In these films, new lightweight equipment allowed for a more flexible approach that sought to explore a given situation rather than impose a preconceived attitude upon it. There was also a greater emphasis on urban life and the benefits and challenges of modernity. In The Days before Christmas, made in 1958 for the CBC television series The Candid Eye, for example, the opening shots again evoke a religious context, as we see the vault of a church and hear a choir singing. There is no establishing shot, and we are plunged straight into an example of the Christmas activities the film will document, in this case a choir practice. A commentary situates the film in “a North American metropolis speaking two languages” and identifies this as Montreal in the days before Christmas. There is a cut from the interior of the church to a windswept city street, still accompanied by the choir singing a carol. As we see close-ups of the faces of passersby, the commentator intervenes once more, referring to the place of Christmas in “the due cycle of the seasons” but also noting that some people will suffer from “sore feet, frayed nerves and upset stomachs.” The film goes on to construct a mosaic of images and sounds, evoking the different aspects of Christmas, a loosely knit impression of the teeming life of a specific place and time, linked by a commentary used more sparingly and with a more descriptive (rather than authoritative) tone than in the classic documentary.6

The francophone filmmakers at the NFB had a more politicized sense of both nation and realism than their anglophone counterparts, and this difference involved questions of cinematic style and ideological strategies that I cannot explore here. However, one of the key features of direct cinema in both languages was its skepticism about the ability of film images to capture reality in the objective way the documentary mode seemed to assume. This tentative coupling of national identity and cinematic realism carried through ...